Harvesting Interactive Fiction

[Music] right now I will now turn you over to Heather albano and harvesting interactive fiction thank you very much I think that's working you can all hear me yeah all right I have been reminded to ask you to please turn off your cell phones or put them on silent and to please remember to fill out your course evaluations all right let's go this is the game Time magazine named as its game of the year 80 days released by inkle this is the game that won the Apple Design Award of 2014 device six released by simogo and this is the game that spent months as top RPG in the iTunes

Store with a brief stint as top overall app a dark room by Emma Riley Rajan these games are all by anyone's definition interactive fiction which means that interactive fiction long perceived as a hobbyist niche is starting to generate interest enthusiasm awards and dollars in the mainstream gaming market video games have a lot more tools at their disposal to evoke player emotion camera angle speed of play the expressions on the faces of the NPCs the tones of their voices when a game form without any of these elements at its disposal starts generating genuine emotion on the part of its players it's worthwhile to investigate why when you see these games sitting at top RPG or winning times award it is even more worthwhile to investigate why

we should discover what games like this have to teach us about storytelling and how we can harvest those techniques when designing narrative for other kinds of games and we're going to do that today first though we should take a step back and define some terms to begin with Who am I I am a freelance narrative designer and game writer I do most of my work for a choice of games I also was lead writer on mission one of codenamed Cygnus and I've done some work on pen and paper RPGs so that's me now what do I mean when I say interactive fiction it's um it's a pretty broad canvas if you take it to mean fiction that is interactive it can be applied to the choose your path tie type made famous by choose your own adventure to the parser based type made famous by infocomm to modern games

built using inform choice script and twine to the audio based codename Cygnus to inkle and inklewriter games to interactive visual novels and there is a meaningful argument that any narrative driven game on any platform whatsoever is interactive fiction generally when people use the term if' though they're talking about something pretty specific they're talking about either parser based or choose your path so we will focus on those quick history of parser based in 1979 Dave Liebling mark blank Albert Vasa and Joel Perez founded infocomm which produced Zork style games or adventure games or parser games until the company's death in 1989 these were games without graphics which were pretty limited in 1980 anyway even if you haven't played when I'm sure you know the format there's a chunk of text there is a cursor the player types in where they wish to go next or explore next or

what they want to do next in a noun and verb combination and the game responds telling them what they see or what happens in consequence of their action infocomm games were known for their storytelling they were in fact distributed via bookstores as well as tourists selling software the company was acquired in 1986 and Activision they're the acquirer shut it down the become division in 1989 but the game form didn't die the fans of the parser based game reverse-engineered info comes technology and created programming languages for developing parser if' the predominant example of which is graham Nelson's inform from 1995 onward the parser if' community has been focused around competitions especially the annual if' comp in which authors submit free games and vote for the best these competitions have resulted in considerable artistic innovation as people stretch the boundaries of the artform the history of choose your path

is similar game books were which were also sold in bookstores were published first by Vermont crossroads press them by Bantam if you are a kid in the 1980s and 90s you probably read slash played at least one and even if you didn't you probably know the tropes there's a chunk of text and then there are multiple-choice series of things you can do if you hit the troll turn to page 17 if you run away turn to page 30 if you try to negotiate turn to page 45 the problem with these early game books was the explosive exponential nature of branching narrative when you have this many branches you can't make every branch a long in-depth story that not realistically not practically and so these early game books were restricted to telling short simple stories mostly suitable for kids so the first choose your path games the game books were pitched towards young kid to kids and young adults and tended

to explore safe comfortable science fiction and fantasy genres fighting fantasy partway solve this problem by representing the choices the player made with a stored variable and the consequences of those choices by calling that variable in lieu of strict branching the only problem was they did this through pencil paper dice and the expectation that the player's brain was going to function as the game computer which works but which restricts their audience to people who are willing to do that kind of work the years between 2009 2012 saw a proliferation of free tools for writing branching narrative games including but not limited to choice script twine and inklewriter these tools were all designed to store and call variables within the game instead of making the player do it with a pencil thus completing fighting fantasies solution the same years saw two different revolutions the first one was

artistic incited by twine people making twine games most of which were small games given away for free made them on a hugely diverse range of topics and storylines and perspectives these were games made by people who were not previously making games voices we hadn't heard before games about things nobody writes games about an artistic expansion that deserves a presentation all by itself the second revolution happened in the commercial industry steam Kickstarter and patreon it became feasible for small studios to make cost-effective text-based projects that actually pay the rent those Studios include choice of games fail better games in coal and tin man games most of them have developed their own tools for developing text-based games most of which are free for anyone to use the

most popular among commercial authors seem to be choice script and inklewriter so examples of modern if' tend to be more or less like one grandparent or the other a spectrum parse I cut out for a second I'm back from a purely parser based all the way to the far right to the branching narrative on the far left to a variety of works in the fuzzy gray middle area what they have in common is that they're all of them are based on words they're all driven by narrative that's it that's all they've got look at the reaction they're getting we're at the narrative summit everybody in this room is in this room because they already believe game narrative is important I don't have to cite statistics to convince you but the fact that there are statistics to cite is interesting it implies that the mainstream gaming market or at least some of it is also coming around to the idea the game narrative narrative is

really really important we have objective evidence that might convince other people the first time we can cite a business need not just an artistic need for great narrative and great storytelling and great prose and games so then what can modern if' teach us about game storytelling as I just described modern if' is an enormous canvas very diverse there are a lot of things I could talk about I only have 25 minutes so I've picked three of the most interesting techniques to cover today poetry ambiguity and complicity by poetry I mean the quality of the prose separate from the quality of the narrative poetry in this context has been defined by choice of games co-founder dan fabulous as short beautiful prose that hits hard when words are all you have to communicate world character story you spend a lot of

time making the words powerful everyone has to count here's an example taken from with those we love alive by porpentine this is one of the first screens you see in the game all the pink words are links if you click on city this is the only description of the city you get 32 words it's 32 words that tell you a hell of a lot or rather impoetant imply a whole lot ropes are strung between the buildings wonder why there's a temple okay I wonder to who or to what why is the canal dry what is a dream distillery that's 32 words doing an awful lot of work they do world building they imply some backstory they open mysteries to investigate and they are enormous ly effective in communicating the atmosphere of the game and one of the ways they do this is by implying

rather than delivering utilitarian exposition these are short sentences with carefully chosen words that suggest things to the player who then needs to engage with the game engage with the words engage with the world to fill in the blanks for themselves it's actually interesting I was making this point because the two speakers before me made the same point about encouraging the player to fill in blanks for themselves so that they're brought into the experience they're having part of the strength of this text comes from its ambiguity which moved me on to my next topic to some degree ambiguity an if' is unavoidable it's a byproduct of the medium without graphics and without obviously an infinite amount of space for text you cannot possibly cover every detail the players imagination has to fill in some of the details there's obviously a degree to which this is true for any game medium Daniel Greenberg I think phrased it best

last year he said the GDC last year the game world does not exist on the screen the game world exists between the ears of the player this is more true for something text-based then something not text-based simply because there's only the one tool and this is a feature not a bug it can be used deliberately you're gonna have to omit some of the details so you pick which ones decide where you want the players imagination actively filling in gaps I just showed how with those we love alive does this a dark room with its sparse description does this device 6 does this to great effect the review I quoted on the second slide up there praises it for this very technique it calls the game one of those elusive stories you never quite feel you've got a grip of the protagonist spends the entire game trying to fathom what's going on around her never quite does so and the experienced all the more

engrossing because of it some questions are best left unanswered and the first choice of game choice of the Dragon did this by the way in which it asks the player to specify their dragons gender not just you get to choose between a binary but you get to choose almost anything including a refusal to answer and the game works equally well in any of those any of if you pick any of those options because the game is designed for this to be one of the spaces where the players imagination is filling in the blanks ambiguity can also be used as a deliberate tool when the designer chooses not just what to leave out but choose to make an aspect of the game deliberately unclear requiring the player to interpret it and act on his or her interpretation Emily shorts blood and laurels does this the motivations and allegiances of NPCs are variable requiring the observation and

interpretation of my new clues to classify and replot Canadian lands does this with a variety of its world building and character interaction elements not to mention its ending and Alain De Niro's solarium does it in multiple places within the text this one's my favorite clicking on the word man changes it to woman clicking on the second his changes it to her but the middle his stays constant what exactly is the author saying any one of four things at least four epigrams for the price of one finally there are those if' games that use ambiguity is a deliberate tool not at the pros or the world-building level but at the narrative design level itself the second choice of game choice of broad size use this technique in the final scene the PC always meets the enemy captain in battle but based on the player's earlier choices the enemy captain can be a star-crossed lover a dear friend a rival of long standing or a bitter enemy the scene plays out the

same way the same actions on the players part lead to promotion or to court-martial but precisely where the challenge lies the precise that the desirable outcome the way the scene looks is variable dependent on the way the player has previously interacted with the game and the prey the choices they have made the emotional connections they have formed for stories for the price of one the game world does not exist on the screen exists between the ears of the player ambiguity leaves room for the player to draw their own conclusions provide their own interpretation insert themselves more meaningfully into the narrative the choices you make in broadsides make you complicit not only in the ending but the whole story not just how the story ends but what the story is allowing or forcing the player to fill in blanks themselves gives the player an absolutely incomparable sense of involvement in the story which brings us

to the most interesting I have technique so when I think has the greatest promise when adapted into other types of game narrative complicity where complicity is defined as a feeling of ownership in the plot now I think we can all agree that's an important thing to have if we didn't think that was an important thing to have we would be writing some other kind of fiction novels or screenplays we are writing interactive fiction because the space where the player interacts with the story is part of what we're trying to do complicity is part of what we're manufacturing there are multiple ways you can do this the first is you can give the player actual choices and a lot of those choices to actually affect the narrative these are games that already do this blood and laurels eightydaze anything from choice of games are made using choice script there are obviously a number of video games that do this as well there are more variables that need be considered when your game has more elements than just words but there are ways to handle a player choice driven branching narrative so that it

represents only an incremental and not an exponential increase in production cost a choice of games has a few techniques for managing some of the perceived problems with branching narrative but again I only have 25 minutes and that's another presentation maybe next year for the moment whether or not you have the budget and artistic scope to allow real choices you can make much of what the player does feel like a real choice by constructing a feeling of freedom for the player what do I mean by that this is a screenshot from Haiti and plans and this is a very typical parser if' experience you have your description and you have your cursor and you get to decide then verb and noun to type next out of all the verbs and all the nouns in the universe parts are IIF enthusiasts say this is one of their favorite parts of the genre you can do anything except that is obviously not actually true you cannot do anything you can do what the game has been programmed

to allow you to do but you feel like you can do anything tomorrow the words of Carolyn dye Nestle tain the core parser experience grants the illusion of infinite choice and an actual experience of carefully restricted choice and to go on in Andrew potkins own words the core value of parser if' is freedom of action the player approaches it as an open end range of choice I could do anything so what does it make sense to try and as soon as the player asks what makes sense here they are immersed in the game world when you feel you can do anything what you choose to do is that much more meaningful if you're unable unwilling artistically restricted to what an offering real choice or an illusion of freedom you can still make the players inevitable action feel like I did it rather than the game made it happen to me by if you pay attention to how the action is executed this is at a higher level philosophically than storytelling technique we're talking about mechanics since most mechanical sense the way that

your player interacts with your game so parser enthusiasts say parser AF has this one great advantage over multiple choice lists if you decide to do something you have to type it not just I did it not just it happened to me but I did it reactive Studios knows this too anything you do in codename cygnus must be spoken out loud now let's talk about the broader implication with the advent of motion sensing and voice-activated input devices such as the Kinect it has become possible to actually allow the player to swing the sword throw the punch climb the ladder and say the word so let's say you have an input device that can reliably interpret a player reading off a dialog tree just think what words you could put in their mouths short beautiful prose that it's hard the Picard speech that brings peace to warring factions the order to kill the enemy captain who is also your star-crossed lover these are the

experiences this is the level of emotional experience that we can be bringing to our players so to recap looking at public response to some of this year's interactive fiction offerings suggests a growing interest in good story separate from any other consideration is has evolved a number of storytelling techniques that can be harvested when writing for other types of games and if' has evolved a number of tools for designing narrative this is not a tool for designing narrative this is optimized for other things it does them very well numbers graphs formulas got it knocked it is not optimized for storyboarding or prototyping narrative these are they are designed specifically for narrative structure branching or otherwise they are easy to use they are free to use for prototyping and they

will make your life so much easier than using a spreadsheet so there is the perception that the day of interactive fiction has come and gone that it gave birth to the graphics based game and then faded away except for a small fandom in a back room somewhere but that's not true interactive fiction is a vibrant art form it is still evolving it is still trying new experiments it is still developing new techniques and there is hard evidence to suggest it still has a hell of a following growing all the time the established narrative techniques and new narrative experiments and i/f are generating enthusiasm from your target market and from people who might become your target market by using if's narrative techniques in conjunction with other tools for game development video games can be taken to new artistic heights and perhaps also to new heights on Metacritic thank you [Applause] [Music]